


love shot

by candybank



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: M/M, angst i guess haha, assassin junhui, barista minghao, wanted (2008 movie) au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 04:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21440560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candybank/pseuds/candybank
Summary: junhui can hit a bullseye in his sleep.
Relationships: Wen Jun Hui | Jun/Xu Ming Hao | The8, Wen Jun Hui | Jun/Yan An
Comments: 5
Kudos: 60





	love shot

**Author's Note:**

> tw: the 3 g's (guns, goons, gays)

_ **wanted** _

he taps the trigger and a bullet falls loose from the barrel of the gun, soaring through the air at one-thousand miles a second until it pierces the metal plate one-thousand meters away with a loud  _ pop!  _ or is it a bang? junhui doesn’t pay much attention to what comes after the fact.

“good shot,” yanan says, the look on his face almost mocking.

junhui stares at him as he reloads the gun, having held rifles for so long that he can hit a bullseye in his sleep. he pulls back, reloads, re-centers. with the stock pressed against his shoulder, he looks through the rear sight with both eyes open, then he taps the trigger again. again, again, again — shooting so relentlessly that the paper target falls to the floor.

yanan laughs, “are you mad about something, officer?”

junhui shakes his head, “not at anything i shouldn’t be.”

———

“hey, how was work?” minghao calls from the kitchen.

as he toes off his shoes, junhui hears the crackle and sizzle of things cooking over a pan. he smells garlic and onions, and minghao’s shampoo. their apartment always smells like minghao’s shampoo, like mint and strawberries. he leaves his bag on the couch and walks to the kitchen, still in his gray socks and blue uniform pants and old blue police academy shirt.

“fine,” junhui sighs softly, voice low as he wraps his arms around minghao’s waist and presses a kiss against his jaw. “how was school?”

minghao smiles, not letting affection deter him from making a good sauce. “fine,” he answers, turning his head to give junhui a quick kiss.

junhui kisses him for a second too long before leaving for their shared bedroom. he comes out moments later, hair damp, clothes damp because he can never be bothered to completely dry himself before getting dressed. as routines go, he sets the table then plops down on the couch to watch the news — or a drama, if the news gets too sad or gruesome. tonight, it’s something about a woman and her children being stabbed to death in their own home, so he flips the channel to watch a poor girl cry about a rich boy.

“food’s ready,” minghao calls moments later.

junhui ignores the buzzing of his phone, and he runs to the table.

———

some days, all they do is stare at the sun and wait for the world to turn. some days, junhui secretly wishes for the world to stop turning. he looks up at the clouds, trying to make shapes out of them the way minghao does, but he can never quite see anything besides time passing by.

now, as they count stars and wait for the sun to rise, he wishes time would stop. he wishes his phone would stop ringing, wishes he didn’t have to empty minghao’s tank of gas yesterday, wishes he didn’t have to slash minghao’s car tire with a nail. he closes his eyes.

“i wish the world would stop,” junhui says.

“hm?”

then he grabs the gun at his belt and puts a bullet through minghao’s head.

_ **complicated** _

let’s rewind to a few days ago. no, to three years ago. when things were complicated, but not you-have-to-kill-the-only-person-you’ve-ever-loved complicated.

junhui meets minghao at a cafe. it’s a cliche. minghao’s working as a barista and junhui can’t live without directly injecting caffeine into his veins at six-thirty a.m. sharp. minghao has taken his order so often, and seen him often enough to get a crush on him, that he already has junhui’s drink made before he gets there.

“thanks,” junhui laughs, thinking the crush is cute and a little weird, but minghao is cute so it’s cute. he thinks it’s cute. minghao’s cute. he can’t get the thought out of his mind for days.

“you’re cute,” he says, “let’s go out sometime.”

and so, minghao writes his number on a piece of tissue.

they go out, and they fall in love, and they spend summers at the beach and snowfall in the city, and they watch clouds and they watch stars. noses bumping, hands clasped, lips locked, feeling as if things could never end.

“so, what do you do for work?” minghao finally asks after a year of dating. he’d asked once before, and junhui had brushed him off with a joke, and he felt as if it was a question he shouldn’t ask so he didn’t ask again. but they’ve been together for a year, and it’s looking like they’ll be together forever, and he thinks it’s reasonable to want to know the answer to this.

“i actually wanted to talk to you about that,” junhui says, leaning forward over the table as if he’s about to tell minghao some devastating secret, like i’m an undercover assassin for a secret organization called the Fraternity, or i don’t have a job. “i’m being transferred stations. i was wondering if you’d come with me.”

minghao’s mouth falls open in surprise. “you’re…?”

“a police officer,” junhui says, chuckling and taking minghao’s hand, “look at us finishing each other’s sentences. we’re so cute.”

“a police officer… how come you never told me?”

junhui shrugs. “now you know,” he says, “anyway, will you come?”

so, minghao leaves his life behind to start a new one. junhui’s still in it, he thinks, so it doesn’t feel all that new. he goes back to school and takes up a part-time barista job, and he does art shows on weekends and sometimes junhui goes to see him

“these are really nice,” junhui says, and minghao gets the distinct feeling that he’s lying.

minghao blushes, “thanks.”

junhui laughs, and he grabs minghao by the waist, “it looks amazing.”

“sure you’re not just saying that because it’s a painting of you?”

———

minghao is waking up from a long night when he hears the clicking and clacking of metal.

“ _ minghao _ ,” junhui shakes him awake, incredibly panicked, only half-dressed, “you have to get up. we have to go.”

they run. they leave town. they get a new apartment in a different city. junhui says it was a case gone wrong, and minghao says thank god you’re safe. and junhui kisses him as if he’s already forgotten everything he said.

“i won’t let anyone hurt you,” junhui promises.

———

junhui doesn’t like looking at mirrors. he likes looking to the rest of the world, but not much at himself. it’s  _ poetic _ — when he sees his face, he sees the face of everyone he’s ever killed, which yanan says is a shame, because he’s so very handsome.

yanan, who lives his life as an assassin with no apologies and no double identities and no fake names, who loves killing so much that he can’t even be bothered to get a day job because he says it’s time he could be spending killing someone, who fucked junhui twice before junhui fell in love and says if he fucked him one more time junhui would have fallen in love with him instead, he laughs at all of junhui’s problems.

“i’m getting surgery to get a bullet removed from my chest and you’re stressed over forgetting to buy milk,” he says, struggling to breathe a little because a bullet had buried itself a little too close to his lungs and he’d let it live inside him for longer than he should have, and junhui can’t say that he doesn’t have a point.

“we all have our problems,” junhui says.

“mine’s not a living, breathing, domestic problem.”

———

minghao is so wonderful. junhui keeps forgetting that he’s a problem. he smiles like sunshine and cries like rain, and he kisses like flowers blooming in spring, and junhui had already forgotten how to live but then minghao came into his life.

minghao came into his life with his coffee beans and his sharpie on tissue paper, and he taught junhui how to live again. he teaches junhui how a day can be beautiful again, how the night can be for other things besides sleeping again. i love you, he says, and junhui forgets to look at the loom.

———

“you always knew it would happen,” yanan says over a pint of beer.

junhui appreciates that he’s at least trying to sound sincere.

“i always knew it would happen,” he sighs.

“well, are you sad about it?”

junhui shrugs, forgetting the feeling of it as soon as he tries to remember. “did it have to be so cliche?”

_ **dead** _

the autopsy report falls short of facts. suicide, it says, as if minghao ever held or even saw a gun in his life. his body is white on the table, face patched up from where junhui had blasted his brain out of his skull, and he’s dead. no hope of bringing him back, no do-overs, no re-writes _dead_.

junhui has to scoff. he wipes his nose with the sleeve of his shirt, and pretends to yawn when he meant to sniffle.

“are you crying?” yanan asks, laughing.

“no,” junhui says, nose itchy and red, “allergy season.”

———

why they rely on errors to correct the future is something junhui has never quite understood, and never quite tried to. the loom in the room spins and spins and spins, and they watch and wait for it to regurgitate a mistake that will turn into a name into a face into a bullet curved across the air and pushed by the laws of motion into a body.

that’s how they absolve themselves of responsibility. this is the law of the universe, they say. this is faith, and they don’t determine it, they only enforce it.

chan throws his arm and pulls at the trigger the way yanan taught him to, but the bullet hits the wall instead of the target and it stays buried inside the concrete. a wasted chance, a missed opportunity. yanan takes the gun from him and shoots the way he should. the bullseye is punctured, and chan sighs.

“shoot straight, aim left,” yanan tells him, giving the gun back.

“he’s a little young,” junhui says, observing chan’s form that seems too good already.

yanan grins, “we were younger.”

———

“it’s been ten years,” yanan says ten years later, over cups of coffee and guns tucked away in holsters. “you have to let it go.”

“easy for you to say,” junhui replies, talking just as hard as breathing, “you’ve never had to kill anyone you loved — if you even love anyone.”

“love,” the word tumbles out of yanan’s mouth like a lost girl. he thumbs at the gun in his belt, and in the next moment he pulls it out.

junhui stares down at the barrel, taking too long to realize what this is.

“me?” he asks, voice sounding like a dull knife trying to slice through wood.

“the loom says so,” yanan tells him, “you made a mistake. they would have found us.”

junhui blinks once, twice.

“go on then,” he says, leaning forward to press his forehead against the gun, “come on.”


End file.
